A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1881. SECOND EDITION. Complete with both half-titles and all blanks. With 33 plates, 36 page-publisher’s advertisements dated Sept., 1881, plus another 8 pages of publisher advertisements. Original cloth, rebacked with the original spine laid down; interior excellent. Unopened. From the library of Stillman Drake, with his bookplate in both volumes. Second edition of this classic work on the electromagnetic theory of light by Maxwell (1831-1879), probably the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century. Here he demonstrates that electromagnetism travels through space in transverse waves similar to those of light and having the same velocity, advancing the hypothesis that light and electricity are the same in their ultimate source. “A generation later Einstein’s work on relativity was founded directly upon Maxwell’s celebrated contribution to electro-magnetic theory; it was this that led him to equate Faraday with Galileo and Maxwell with Newton” (PMM).

For the first edition (1873), see Dibner, Ten Founding Fathers of the Electrical Sciences, pp. 45-46; Horblit, 72; Norman, II, 1466; Printing & the Mind of Man, 355.